


Aftermaths

by Cerusee



Series: the patterned flight of starlings [1]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Bruce gets to the warehouse in time, Bruce is not having the greatest day okay, Clark is a good friend, Gen, a death in the family AU, cw: description of serious injuries, for that matter neither is Jason, nothing too graphic I think, sheila’s in deep shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-30
Updated: 2018-04-30
Packaged: 2019-04-30 08:45:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14493207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/pseuds/Cerusee
Summary: Nine hours.It had been almost nine hours.Three hours and forty-five minutes in the air; before that, an hour and fifteen minutes in the Addis Ababa airport, waiting for the next flight to Cairo; before that, three hours in the chopper, from Amba Mariam to Addis Ababa.Beforethat...it was less than hour in the warehouse, total, Bruce knew that.  But he couldn’t quite account for all the minutes, couldn’t piece together exactly how long he’d spent doing what.  How long he’d spent on each of them.(Or, Ethiopia, and what came after.)





	Aftermaths

Nine hours.

It had been almost nine hours.

Three hours and forty-five minutes in the air; before that, an hour and fifteen minutes in the Addis Ababa airport, waiting for the next flight to Cairo; before that, three hours in the chopper, from Amba Mariam to Addis Ababa.

Before _that_...it was less than hour in the warehouse, total, Bruce knew that. But he couldn’t quite account for all the minutes, couldn’t piece together exactly how long he’d spent doing what. How long he’d spent on each of them.

Almost nine hours, and every hour felt like a year. He couldn’t even check his phone for updates, while they were still in the air. Still, he kept brushing his pocket, waiting for the vibration.

He wished he’d just taken the jet at the start of all this. It would still take too long to get back, but at least it would be faster than flying commercial.

Nine hours. And there was still a two-hour layover waiting for him in Cairo—miraculously short, under the circumstances, really—and another twelve hours of flight time, back to the States.

Clark had sent a single text: _Metropolis_ , so he knew which airport to fly into.

With the layover, it didn’t matter how slow the deplaning process was once they landed in Cairo, but every minute on the tarmac was still an exercise in frustration. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and took it off Airplane mode. The screen immediately lit up with a series of texts, flashing by too fast for Bruce to catch more than a few words here and there. The latest was from Clark, though, and it read _Meet me at baggage carousel 5 in CAI_.

Bruce stared at it for a moment, and a wave of something approaching relief washed over him with the realization that Clark was probably about to spare him fourteen more hours of travel. Deplaning quickly felt that much more urgent now, though. _Damn_ , but he wished he could just abandon his luggage. He didn’t dare, though; he had the suit meticulously packed into a custom-designed suitcase, and he couldn’t just leave that behind, its contents to potentially be discovered by some light-fingered baggage handler. (The case was secured with a biometric lock, but it was still vulnerable to blunt force. A few swings with an axe would suffice.) He ground his teeth until they ached, during the slow, finicky dance of travellers filtering from their seats, contorting around each other to reach the bags in the overhead compartments. He wanted to shove himself down the aisle to exit faster, didn’t care if he was the embodiment of the ugly American when he did it, but they’d still have to wait on the baggage, and there was no point to potentially creating a disturbance.

It took twenty minutes. They were now at nine hours and twenty minutes.

Getting to baggage carousel five took another seven minutes.

Clark had his hands in his pockets, when Bruce finally made it there, and he was one of the only people standing alone who didn’t have a phone in hand. He raised one hand to signal Bruce.

“He’s stable, and Alfred’s with him,” Clark said, as soon as Bruce was near enough to hear. “He woke up once when I was with him, and he asked for you.”

Bruce’s heart thrummed. _I wasn’t there_.

“They wouldn’t tell me much else, since I’m not family, but when I left, they were discussing surgery. The arm is bad, Bruce.”

Surgery. It could be so much worse than that. But this was still bad.

“Alfred doesn’t have the legal standing to sign off on that. I need to be there as soon as possible.”

Clark glanced over. “It should be about another...twelve minutes, before your luggage comes out.” He looked back at Bruce, with one eyebrow crooked.

“Can it wait?”

“It can wait.”

For twelve minutes, they stood by the baggage carousel, listening to the regular, mechanical thumps, and and the casual murmur of the other passengers waiting for their bags, watching the snaking pattern of the machine, interrupted every half minute by some passenger darting forward to grab a bag, and drag it off, like a dog grabbing at a fallen scrap of roast.

Finally, the case came into view. “That’s mine,” Bruce said, reaching towards it.

Thirty very confusing seconds later, Bruce was standing just outside of a hospital door. He looked over his shoulder and glared at Clark.

“I’ll just drop this off,” Clark said, dangling the fifty-pound reinforced metal suitcase off of his index finger. “Go ahead and sign in. They’re waiting for you.” 

And then he was gone.

It wasn’t like this wasn’t exactly where he’d wanted to be for the past nine hours, but dammit, he could have at least warned Bruce.

Bruce made his way into the reception area of Metropolis General Hospital, and strode towards the woman behind the desk. “I’m Bruce Wayne,” he said. “I’ve been told you’ve admitted my son, Jason, for treatment?”

***

_Approximately nine and a half hours earlier:_

Bruce saw red.

From the moment he swept into the warehouse, when he saw the Joker’s skinny purple arm swinging the crowbar down onto Robin’s skull, he’d seen nothing but red.

When he’d seized the Joker by his collar, when he’d dragged him back and smashed his face against the wall—all he’d seen was fresh, wet, red blood trickling down from the Joker’s nose, staining his shirt, his tacky, red-streaked violet jacket. The jacket hadn’t had those streaks before. 

He saw red when he’d punched the side of the Joker’s skull, twice, he hadn’t even been looking for it, but there it was: blood, on his gauntlets. Sticky—sticking—everywhere.

Bruce had dropped him, then, thinking he wasn’t a threat anymore. He’d turned to Jason, only wanting to know if he was still alive—but the Joker had dragged himself over and grasped at Bruce’s ankle, started to pull himself up, using Bruce’s leg as a ladder, and then he’d _reached_ towards Jason.

There was a set of minutes Bruce didn’t think he’d ever get back. And when it was over, Bruce _knew_ that the Joker wasn’t a threat anymore; that he might never be a threat again.

He could worry about that later.

Jason _was_ still alive. He was struggling to stay upright. “She’s in on it,” he’d whispered to Bruce, his good arm pointing at the warehouse door. “Don’t let her get away.” Half his mask was torn from his face, and his eyes were desperate. “Batman. _Go_.”

Bruce had knelt, for just one second, and let his hand graze over Jason’s hurt arm. “Wait here, Robin, and don’t move,” he’d ordered, sternly, and Jason’s eyes had closed, and he nodded.

And then Bruce was on his feet again, dashing out the door after her.

The warehouse was set aways from the nearest village. There wasn’t much traffic between them, and it wasn’t hard to follow her footsteps.

He pounded over dirt and sand after her, then dodged through strings of blankets and winding cloths, swinging in the wind. Through stacks of emptied crates, built up like a plastic fortress. As Bruce came charging around the corner of a shanty building, a woman saw him, and stiffened, pointing wordlessly off to her right.

Bruce took a right.

There she was, in the alley.

Sheila Haywood was still pounding on the door when he caught up with her. It had just swung open, as Bruce advanced on her, but then the room’s occupant had caught sight of Batman, and the door slammed shut.

Sheila backed up against the dead end of the alley, her arms splayed out. “What do you want from me?”

“What do you _think_ I want?” he growled.

“I haven’t done anything! I’m a _doctor!_ ”

“You were in a warehouse, watching the Joker viciously beat that boy, and you did nothing. Explain yourself.”

Sheila cringed. “He was threatening me! The Joker. I didn’t want to. He was going to _hurt_ me.”

“You’re coming with me,” Bruce said, reaching for her.

Sheila’s arm swung up. Too late, he saw the glint of the muzzle.

She was making the obvious mistake, aiming towards the emblem, towards the strongest part of the armor. 

Sheila was making the mistake that people kept making, over, and over again, no matter what he did.

 _Why is it always this?,_ Bruce thought, helplessly. _Why always an alleyway and the wrong end of a gun?_

She fired.

***

Jason was curled up against the warehouse walls, struggling to stay conscious, his eyes closing every few seconds, then fluttering open again. His left arm frightened Bruce, and his breathing wasn’t good. His nose was bleeding. Bruce had peeled off his domino mask long enough to see that Jason’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. Jason had taken a blow to the head, but not, it appeared, to the face, and the possible cause of that nosebleed was worrying Bruce.

He’d managed to get a few critical details from Jason, but it was clear he was succumbing to shock and the pain from his arm. He was whimpering, making unsettling little noises. Bruce remembered those. When Two-Face had beaten Robin—when he’d _hurt_ Dick, so badly. All Bruce wanted to do was snatch Jason up and carry him to safety now the same way he’d carried Dick then.

But they weren’t in Gotham. They weren’t even in a city. They were hours away from Addis Ababa. All Bruce had was a single helicopter, and too many destinations.

He looked over the three of them, scattered over the concrete floor of the warehouse: Jason, his breathing labored; Sheila Haywood, arms and legs bound in zip-ties, punctuating her silence with the odd threat....

...and the Joker. Lying there, still alive, that obscene insult to humanity. Stubbornly, obstinately, _still alive._

 _Nothing will_ ever _stop you_ , he thought. _Nothing will ever stop you, as long as you breathe._

Bruce turned his back on him, and stalked over to where Sheila lay. She glared up at him, falling silent now that he was within striking range. 

“If you hadn’t so thoroughly given yourself away,” he told her, sinking slowly to one knee, leaning over her. “I’d be tempted to untie you, _Doctor_ Haywood, so you could give him the medical attention he needs. But you’re not much of a physician, are you? Clearly you’ve forgotten the part of your oath where you swore to _do no harm_.”

Sheila jerked her head away. He thought she might have moaned. He didn’t care.

Jason was his first priority.

Jason needed help, and he needed it now. But Bruce had two prisoners to wrangle, the local hospitals were already frantically overextended, and frankly, they wouldn’t have been his first choice for treatment even if they weren’t.

He needed a second set of hands. 

He needed _speed_. 

There was an obvious solution. Bruce pushed himself up, and walked until he was clear of the warehouse door, and then a little longer. He cleared his throat, and called for Clark.

It took three and a half minutes.

“Sorry about the delay,” Clark apologized, before the dust from his sudden entrance had even settled again. “I was digging a town in California out from under a mudslide that kept...sliding.” He flicked a little dried dirt off of his wrist.

Bruce ushered Clark into the warehouse.

Clark’s eyes widened as he took in the scene in front of him. “What did you—what _happened?_ ” he asked, his gaze lingering on the Joker. And then it flickered over to Jason, and he was by Jason’s side faster than Bruce’s brain could even process the flicker of movement; one eye insisting that Clark was _here_ , when he was already over _there_. 

“His arm is pieces,” Clark said, grimly, kneeling beside Jason, not quite touching him. “It’s bad, Batman. And he has broken ribs and a skull fracture. Where do you want him?”

“ _Home_ ,” Bruce said. “The best hospital you know, I don’t care where. Street clothes. Just go. I’ll deal with...this. We’ll talk later.”

Clark nodded as he stripped off his cape and wrapped gently it around Jason. They were gone in the next second.

Bruce was suddenly alone in the warehouse, the unconscious Joker on one side, and Sheila Haywood to the other.

Suddenly, Bruce had all the time in the world.

***

Even in the chopper, it took over three hours to reach Addis Ababa from Amba Mariam. It didn’t help that he’d put three people in a two-person helicopter, Sheila in the passenger seat, the Joker scrunched up in the space behind. Fortunately, Sheila wasn’t very big, and the Joker, for all his deceptively wiry strength, was not a bulky man.

It took Sheila twenty-four minutes to nerve herself up to ask, “What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to hand _both_ of you two over to the Ethiopian Federal Police for conspiracy to commit murder.”

“I’m telling you, I never wanted to help him! He was blackmailing me!”

“Using what?”

Something she’d rather he didn’t know, apparently; Sheila didn’t answer.

“Even if I believed that you bore no responsibility for your participation in a scheme to divert medical supplies from desperate refugees, and then to _murder_ them using a particularly gruesome method of execution—have you ever seen someone die from exposure to the Joker’s laughing gas? Because I have, _Doctor_ Haywood, and it’s more than a little gruesome—you shot me point blank in the chest. For a physician, you don’t seem to place much value the sanctity of human life.”

“You were trying to kidnap me,” Sheila said, gamely. “It was self-defense.”

“You lured Robin into that warehouse and held him at gunpoint while the Joker beat him with a crowbar. You were hoping to eliminate him, after you confessed to embezzling from the MSF—another example of your sterling medical ethics, there, Doctor—are you going to try to claim that _that_ was self-defense as well?”

Sheila fell silent again.

He spared a glance over at her; he could practically see the gears turning in her head.

“If you turn me over to the police, they’re going to interrogate me,” she said, after a couple minutes.

“It’s fairly standard,” he said, dryly.

“Who knows _what_ I might say? It just might slip that _Robin_ is _Jason Todd_ , Bruce Wayne’s kid. That’s right,” she said, smugly. “I recognized Wayne when they showed up together. Every Gothamite knows his face, even ex-pats like me. Could be awfully inconvenient for all _three_ of you, if that got out.”

He couldn’t tell whether she’d guessed or not. If she hadn’t made the leap already, she still might. It didn’t matter.

Piloting required too much of his attention for him to lean over and menace her the way he really wanted to, so he channeled everything into his voice, let it drip with condescension and menace. “ _Doctor_. Do you know how many criminals suddenly seem to know the identities of Batman and Robin, when they’re trying to make a bargain? Whatever you _think_ you know, you have no proof. You only have your word. And your word is as meaningless as your Hippocratic Oath, Doctor Haywood. You’re welcome to try to bargain your way out of prison on an unsubstantiated claim. See how far it gets you.”

“You can’t,” Sheila said, in a faint voice. “You can’t do this to me. Please. Do you know what what prison here is like? Please, at least...report me to the MSF. Let France extradite me. At least let me be tried _there_ , not here.”

“You’ve tried to kill quite a great many of people today, Doctor Haywood. You have greater crimes to answer for than just being a thief. You were willing to be party to the cold-blooded massacre of hundreds of suffering people, the same people you were supposed to be helping. This is _exactly_ where you belong.”

***

Bruce left Sheila and the Joker in the custody of a deputy commander at the Federal Police Headquarters in Addis Ababa, after describing the Joker’s scheme to him, and giving him a rundown of the places where the FDP could find corroborating evidence, and the most likely locations of the trucks with the stolen supplies and the men driving them. He might normally have preferred to stick around until all the loose ends were cleared up, but he wanted even more to get back to Jason. The Joker was out of commission for the time being. The Ethiopian authorities could handle it from here.

The deputy commander had been curiously uncurious about the severely battered state in which Bruce had delivered one of his prisoners. That...probably wasn’t a good sign.

Bruce could not bring himself to care. Not yet. Not until he saw Jason again. Not until he knew he’d be all right.

He wished he’d taken the jet when he set out after the Joker in the first place. He’d been traveling under a false passport, so it didn’t matter whether he had a record of himself legally leaving Ethiopia and reentering the United States (it _would_ matter for Jason, who’d been traveling under his own passport—dammit, he’d need to take care of that later) but commercial flights were so much slower. It was going to take a day or more before he was home again.

***

_Now:_

Bruce almost made it up to Jason’s room when he was intercepted by a woman in a leather jacket.

“Excuse me—you wouldn’t happen to be Bruce Wayne, by any chance?”

“That’s me. And you are…?”

She produced a badge, holding it long enough for Bruce to actually examine it. “Detective Kamen, with the MCPD. Mr. Wayne, we’re trying to figure out how your son ended up unconscious and badly injured in a Metropolis alleyway. I was hoping you’d be able to answer a few questions.”

“Officer, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on,” Bruce said sharply. “I just got back from a business trip, and when I checked my messages, I heard that my son was here. I don’t know a damn thing except that my boy is hurt, and I need to see him. _Now_.”

“Of course, sir,” she said, backing off. “I believe his doctor is in his room right now, along with Mr. Pennyworth.”

“Alfred...oh thank God,” Bruce said. He sidestepped the detective and pushed into Jason’s room.

He noted the presence of the aforementioned doctor, a tall woman with her hair pulled back in a french braid, and a no-nonsense demeanor, as well as Alfred, who was sitting by the bedside, holding Jason’s uninjured hand in his own, and then his gaze fell on the boy himself.

 _He looks like hell_ , Bruce thought, with a pang. Even in a light blue hospital gown, instead of the bright colors of Robin, he looked far too pale, and there was a large bandage on his head. His eyes were closed, but his breathing sounded much better than it had in the warehouse, and he wasn’t making those noises of distress anymore. His left arm was propped up and swimming in ice packs. “Is he—”

“You’re Mr. Wayne, I take it?”

Bruce nodded, eyes still on Jason.

“I’m Dr. Johnson, and for the time being, I’m the physician directing Jason’s care.” She offered her free hand to Bruce, who shook it absently. “Right now, he’s sleeping. He was unconscious when he was initially brought in, which was...hmm, about nine and a half hours ago, I believe, but he’s woken up several times since then on his own, which is a good sign. He’s not terribly lucid at the moment, although he was able to identify himself, and he’s repeatedly asked for you. He has a closed skull fracture—”

“A _skull_ fracture—” Bruce had already seen Jason’s injuries up close, and gotten Clark’s X-ray diagnosis, but he let himself react with the horror he would have felt if he was hearing this for the first time.

“—and a severe concussion,” the doctor continued on, as if Bruce hadn’t interrupted her. “We want to keep an eye on that, so we’ve elected not to sedate him for the moment. We’ve got him on some non-drowsy inducing painkillers. He’s also got a couple of broken ribs—seventh and eight on the right side of his ribcage—we’ve taped those up, which is all we can really do for that. But what I’m really concerned about is his left forearm, Mr. Wayne. Something—or someone —hit him hard enough to shatter the ulna and fracture his radius, to boot. We could just set the radius and put him in a cast, but he’s definitely going to need surgery for the ulna—maybe pins, more likely a bone graft and a rod, to put the bone back together.”

“A bone graft…”

“Yes, Mr. Wayne. The good news is that we’re equipped to do what’s called an allograft—that’s a graft using donated bone tissue—which means we won’t need to do a second surgery to harvest Jason’s own bone tissue.”

Small mercies.

“We wanted to get the swelling down first in any case,” the doctor said, “but this surgery would not meet the criteria for emergency lifesaving treatment, and as Jason here is a minor, we can’t proceed with the surgery without your permission.”

“Yes,” Bruce breathed. “Of course. Granted. Show me where to sign.”

“I’ll get the forms,” the doctor said. Her demeanor softened just a little. “I’m sure you’d like a few minutes with him in any case.”

“Please.”

The doctor left, and Alfred released Jason’s hand, and rose. “Mr. Kent gave me a précis of what little he knew, but—”

“I’ll fill you in later, when we have more privacy. It’s a bit of a story.”

“What of… _him_?”

“I left him with the Ethiopian authorities. He’s either in a jail cell, or...more likely, in a hospital. I was...pretty rough on him.”

“I see,” Alfred said, looking at him funny.

Bruce sat down in Alfred’s vacated chair, gently running one hand through Jason’s hair where it wasn’t covered by the bandage.

Jason’s eyes flickered open, and he reached towards Bruce with his good hand. “ _Bruce_ ,” he murmured.

“I’m right here, son,” Bruce said, taking Jason’s hand and squeezing. “I’m sorry it took so long.”

“Here now,” Jason said, contentedly. “What ‘bout…”

“Everything’s all squared away. We can talk about it later, when you’re feeling better, Jay. Right now you just need to rest.”

“‘Kay,” Jason said, already drifting back to sleep.

Alfred rested a hand on Bruce’s shoulder. “Are you all right, sir?”

“I’m fine, Alfred. Not a scratch on me.”

“That’s good to hear, Master Bruce, but it wasn’t entirely what I had in mind. It’s been a most trying day for you. And I know how difficult this is, to sit by your son’s bedside and know he’s in pain.”

“Yes,” he said, around a sudden lump in his throat, his eyes still resting on the steady rise and fall of Jason’s chest. “The Joker had him _alone,_ Alfred. If I hadn’t gotten back when I did—” Bruce shook his head. “I just can’t shake the feeling that this all could have been so much worse.”

**Author's Note:**

> A fun fact I discovered while writing this story is that there are, in fact, non-stop flights between JFK and Addis Ababa, a non-stop only takes sixteen hours, and the low end of ticket prices between JFK and ADD is under a grand. None of that worked for my timeline, so I ignored reality and substituted my own. But I thought y’all might want to know, in case you were ever planning a trip to Ethiopia.
> 
> Amba Mariam is the modern name of the Magdala Valley. I have yet figure out when the name officially changed, but it’s possible “Magdala Valley” was already archaic back in 1988.


End file.
